Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

Friday the 13^th Part VI brought us a new Jason Voorhees and took us in a new direction with a slasher film that understood its legacy and audience. Jason was now an unstoppable undead killing machine and the series was more broad and ridiculous than it ever was. The question was where to take things next? From this point on we wave farewell to Tommy Jarvis, whose legacy is now left behind. We also wave goodbye to Camp Crystal Lake, as we won’t be returning there anytime soon. Weirdly the lake is still called Crystal Lake, even though the last film established it was renamed ‘Forest Green’. Gone too is the self-aware sense of humour. We’ve moved on, and this is the point where the series got a bit stranger and a bit different, but not necessarily for the better. We’ve left those days behind.

The New Blood decides to mix the supernatural with a little science fiction by shoving in a female protagonist with psychic powers. It really doesn’t work too well. I can sort of see what the appeal would be – Jason has fought and killed regular teens for five films now, some of whom have been able to beat him on his own terms (as in physical force, use of blunt/pointed instruments, etc.), so why not have someone fight a physical powerhouse with mental abilities? Well it might have worked if said main character was any good. As said, we’re back to a female protagonist, but instead of being a nice, wholesome, forgettable girl we’ve got a whiny, annoying idiot that’s the worst thing about the movie, a bitchy, shrill moron that drags the movie down by being the worst F13 character. It also doesn’t help that they’ve just put the psychic powers into another generic F13 template, with the exact same tired plot (teens at lake, Jason shows up to kill them, etc.) we’ve seen countless times, with only the ‘psychic powers’ twist offering any difference.

The New Blood is a movie I find frustrating, because it could have been good. The potential was there, and some of the things in the movie work (they nailed Jason Voorhees). But it all falls apart; The New Blood is bad because of its characters and writing. It could have been great if it wasn’t for two things. 1: The gore and violence were all edited down drastically. You can see evidence of sloppy edits as the film cuts away the moment many deaths are about to occur. Without the gore the kills are unspectacular. It’s an unfortunate thing seemingly beyond the filmmakers their control or intent. 2: The most important, and completely the fault of the filmmakers and screenwriters, the main character (and all the others for that matter) and the writing/dialogue are the absolute worst to a painful degree. It’s a shame because this movie is responsible for giving us the best version of Jason Voorhees. This is the iconic version that most people probably think of when picturing Jason.

 

There’s a recap at the beginning, with some random narrator mentioning a ‘death curse’ above Crystal Lake because of Jason Voorhees while a few of the kills from the first four films play. Then we get a series of clips from Part VI (Jason’s resurrection, Tommy killing him again) to catch you up to speed some and establish that Jason’s still at the bottom of the lake. It’s a bit of a messy mix.

Tina is a girl with telekinetic powers. As a child, while vacationing at Crystal Lake with her family, she accidentally drowned her abusive father in the lake with her powers. Now a troubled teenager, she’s returned there with her mother for therapy to understand and control her powers at the suggestion of her therapist Dr Crews, who secretly plans to exploit her telekinesis for study. The therapy isn’t going well as Tina, emotional and full of angst, argues with Crews endlessly, who constantly pushes her to get results. Tina accidentally uses her telekinetic powers to free Jason from his imprisonment at the bottom of the lake, and it isn’t long before he starts stalking and slashing the youths who are hanging out in a nearby house. Tina, meanwhile, begins having horrific visions of Jason’s rampage as she tries to control her powers and stay alive.

The biggest fault by far, and the movie’s biggest crutch, is Tina, our horrible protagonist who is the absolute worst. She’s horribly annoying and completely unlikeable, always shrill and whiny, constantly crying and she’s an obnoxious and stubborn little idiot to boot, always shrieking and complaining. I hated her with a passion, which is never a good thing for a protagonist. She’s there to get therapy for her powers, but does everything she can to argue and avoid cooperating. Even when she’s fighting Jason with her telekinesis she spends the entire time crying and whining – she’s just so horrifically unlikeable and annoying, not helped by the actress being awful. She spends the entire movie being a boohoo girl, especially when she starts hanging out with the other teens (she’s really eager to unload all her personal issues on anybody who’ll listen). And she has to argue with everyone on everything! It’s a notable and jarring step down from Tommy Jarvis and Megan in the previous movie. Tina is one of the absolute worst characters in a F13 movie ever. She’s meant to be the protagonist and we’re meant to be rooting for her but she’s just so annoying and angst-ridden that you don’t care.

It’s an exceptionally obvious fault that bleeds into the rest of the cast – none of the characters are likeable in the least. This is the absolute worst bunch of teens yet; they’re all annoying, shallow, paper-thin idiots, even by F13 series standards. You’ve got geeky girl, slut girl, bitch girl, stoner, token black characters, the nerd and some other idiots. None of them are likeable so you don’t care about the ‘will they die?’ tension, and not a single one of them even acts like a person. They’re all so terrible. What’s worse is that they’re all so ridiculous as though the writer was completely out of touch with reality – the writing and dialogue are cringe worthy. The things they say and do are so awkward and pathetic it’s ridiculous. It’s a big problem because the characters are really the only other thing there is in a F13 movie besides Jason. They take up the so much of the film with their nonsense.

 

One thing that’s funny is that Dr Crews, conniving shiftiness and lies aside, is completely right in his analysis of Tina’s powers – they’re all tied to her emotions and her guilt about killing her father. Of course Tina denies this loudly and obnoxiously for the entire movie, constantly making things fall over with her telekinetic tantrums (thus proving his point), but the dude’s on the money, even though he’s intentionally antagonising her to raise her stress and document her powers (not that it takes much; Tina flips out over anything). He’s less on the money when he tries to convince her that Jason Voorhees is a figment of her imagination, even once he realises Jason’s real and is lurking around killing people. I’m actually not quite sure what his plan was there – he finds evidence that there’s a serial killer running around, and his plan is to hide it from everybody and just stick around? I do love that Crews uses Tina’s idiot mother as a human shield to protect himself against Jason.

It has a dumb ending – after a prolonged, unintentionally funny telekinetic battle that mostly involves Tina looking at objects and then them goofily flying at Jason (because that’s how telekinesis works, right?), Tina somehow uses her powers to raise her dead father as a zombie out of the lake to drag Jason back to the bottom. It raises a lot of dumb questions (So her dad’s body was just sitting at the bottom of the lake the entire time and they never retrieved it? And since when could she reanimate corpses? And how come Tina’s wimpy dead dad is stronger than Jason?). The battle itself is funny in its silliness, though the film treats it seriously. Tina uses her powers to: make doors close, move tables to block said doors, make pot plants/severed heads fly across the room, control tree branches, collapse a porch, make a light globe fall, control electrical cords, shoot gasoline across a room and start a massive house fire (which also explodes for some reason). It would be a better fight if it wasn’t for the constant cuts to Tina’s tearful, snotty face staring at the objects before they fly at Jason, which happens every single time.

There’s a really bad sense of place here, worse than any other F13 movie. We’re at some random houses on Crystal Lake (looking smaller again). It’s almost impossible to tell where anything is in relation to anything else. Sometimes the house Tina is in is directly next to the partying teen’s house, and other times it seems there’s a massive forest between them. Speaking of forests, so much of this film is spent with characters wandering blindly through the woods with no sense of place or direction. Otherwise it’s an ok looking movie. It’s a bit too well-lit everywhere to be creepy (Jason standing inside either house looks silly when all the lights are on).

The one thing I really did love, that the film totally nailed and that’s the absolute best thing in this film, is the look of Jason. This is the best version of him in the entire series, a large, invulnerable monster of a man. He’s been under the water since Part VI, so now he looks like a waterlogged corpse – his clothes are ragged, you can see part of his ribcage, part of his mask is cracked displaying his rotting jaw, and he even still has the length of chain around his neck like a noose. I also like how ghoulish he looks without his mask on. Most of the movies have shown Jason without his mask on, but this is the only time he’s actually looked freaky. There’s also a part at the end there where he’s on fire and completely unconcerned about it. This is Jason as the unstoppable killer and the best unmasked version of him in the entire franchise. He’s also very sturdy, as he was last time. Jason is drowned, electrocuted, hanged, stabbed with needles and even engulfed in flames for an extended period of time (something like twenty on-screen seconds, made particularly impressive since its real fire), but he just keeps coming. This is the iconic Jason Voorhees.

The kills are numerous but unspectacular due to the editing, either occurring off screen or being heavily edited for gore (this has seemingly been edited the most out of any other F13 movie; there are a lot of obvious sloppy cuts just before you see gore), but they couldn’t have happened to a more deserving group. The requisite number of stabbings aside (most kills are variations on ‘you got stabbed’), the most memorable has to be Jason killing a girl in a sleeping bag by swinging her against a tree (a kill that gets two call backs in later instalments). Another silly one is Jason using, of all things, a weed whacker to kill Dr Crews. The difference here is that this movie takes itself seriously which sort of diminishes the fun of the kills. If they weren’t edited for gore they’d be much better and probably would have raised the film up.

The New Blood is a frustrating movie. Jason looks awesome, but everything else is disappointing. The characters are annoying and aggravating, the acting is terrible and the writing is so bad, even for a F13 movie. The kills have all been neutered and the overall experience is just the same old barring its psychic twist. I will begrudgingly say that, despite my hatred for the characters, the Jason scenes are great and the final fifteen minutes of telekinetic battle are fun in their goofiness.

The ending leaves things in a weird place. Jason is at the bottom of the lake again (meaning effectively nothing was accomplished in this movie at all; it basically reset to its beginning and made itself irrelevant), and Tina is alive, but then what? Her mom’s dead, she’s still messed up and she still doesn’t have control over her telekinetic powers. She’s worse off than when she started the film, while Jason is back exactly where he started, right back at Crystal Lake. The next film will remedy this.